The Boss vs. the Apprentice
“Well time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of Glory Days …”
It’s already an old story, but I’m still a little hung up on the fact that Donald Trump, the President of the United States — my president, so long as I live here; my employee, so long as I pay taxes — decided to go to war with Bruce Springsteen.
Rarely does one see such a blatant, dare-I-say simplified example of oppositional philosophies locking horns on a grand stage. In Springsteen and Trump we have two larger-than-life symbols of American masculinity, two distinct paths representing how to live a righteous or how to live like a piece of shit.
What’s interesting to me is that, at each man’s core, there is a commonality. To explain this, however, we have to take in good faith that a sniveling worm like Donald Trump even has a core, but for the sake of argument let’s pretend he does.
Also (though it takes far less of a mental leap) let’s assume that Bruce Springsteen’s persona, the voice of the hard working common man, isn’t just PR. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest this is the case — doing shots with strangers out on Sandy Hook then getting harassed by Mr. State Trooper is, for me anyway, weirdly compelling evidence that everything you think about Bruce is true. But he is a billionaire, and no billionaire, no matter how hard he tries, lives in the same world that you and I do. He may wear work boots, but his feet aren’t really on the ground. To deny this is ludicrous.
That throat clearing aside, how does one reconcile the fact that the drive to “Make America Great Again,” if you can even take these four words at face value, underpins so much of Bruce Springsteen’s project, before such a phrase was contorted into a secret handshake by cheap baseball hats typically made in China?
The essence of Springsteen’s work, even the songs that are just about kids racing the street, yearns for a true America, an honest America, even one filled with outlaws, where there is honor in labor and sanctity in a person’s word. Yes, there is anger (“they’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad track”) but it is always hope, and change comes from within (“come on up for the Rising.”) Blame evaporates quickly when there’s work to do in the land of hope and dreams.
Most people recognize that “MAGA” is just a vague wish to turn back the clock, without much of a plan to get this accomplished. Like Rush Limbaugh’s “The Way Things Ought to Be,” it funnels frustration into an opportunity to target minorities, to demand that queers to stay in the closet and Blacks kids to pull up their pants. A less hateful interpretation, though with hardly more political insight, is that it means “oh, Christ, I’m getting old, and I’m upset about it.” Everyone wants to drink from the Fountain of Youth, not everyone lets nostalgia goad them into attacking the Capitol building.
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Nostalgia, of course, has always been part of Springsteen’s allure. The second song on his first album, 1973’s Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (the very title of which with its iconic postcard cover is a hat-tip to the fact that what used to be a luxury destination had turned into a post-industrial wreck still licking its wounds from race riots) is called “Growin’ Up.”
The song, with its Tin Pan Alley piano and coo-ing “oooooohs,” is a reflection of lost, rebellious youth. With fantasies of blowing up a high school!
The same album also features “Spirit in the Night,” a tale of teenagers driving out to a lake for a night of carousing and coupling, told with an “oh, those were the days,” perspective.
Keep in mind these songs are over 50 years old, recorded before Springsteen’s career even began. By the time we get to Born in the U.S.A, and the track “Glory Days,” Springsteen is, on a very surface level, the unabashed King of Nostalgia. (Amazing to think that “Glory Days” itself is now 40. Going to see Springsteen in concert is, in a way, an opportunity to be nostalgic about the way we used to be nostalgic. Yes, he continues to release outstanding new material, but those numbers don’t get the same volume of cheers.)
There is of course, a level of subtlety in Springsteen’s work that people have been failing to comprehend for decades. The most famous example of this is “Born in the U.S.A.,” which was misinterpreted as a rah! rah! anthem; the song is actually about a Vietnam vet getting screwed because manufacturing jobs have gone overseas.
Similarly, “Glory Days” is a warning that nostalgia is seductive, and almost impossible to avoid. “And I hope when I get old, I don't sit around thinking about it
But I probably will.” Mooning over the past feels real good (“all right, boys, keep it rockin’ now!”) but it’s a dark drug. Take it in small doses. Too much and you wind up buying a red hat, then pissing away your savings on Donald Trump “memecoins.”
The video linked above (directed by John Sayles, much of it at Maxwell’s in Hoboken) expresses it all pretty well. Looking back all the time gets you nowhere. (I’m not sure how this fits my thesis, but it also fun to note the appearance of new-to-the-E-Street-band backup singer Patti Scialfa getting a lot more screen time than Bruce’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Julianne Phillips.)
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A good faith read of MAGA (bring back the 3M plant in Freehold!) and a simple read of “Glory Days” (bring back my pitching arm and also the 3M plant in Freehold!) seem to be saying much the same thing. It’s the only way I can explain how you can drive around the Jersey Shore, where Bruce dominates the air as much as the seagulls, and see so many of those idiotic Cybertrucks.
But under the hood, you’ll quickly see how these two men diverge. In Trump, you have a cheater, a liar, a serial sex offender, a rich kid who has done nothing but exploit legal loopholes to make himself richer, a guy with absolutely no scruples. (Why do I know what a memecoin is? I should not have to know this.) In Springsteen, you see a driven, determined man with a demonstrable talent (he’s not Andres Segovia, but he plays guitar better than I do!) who has consistently used his platform to promote the cause of social justice.
No Nukes, 41 Shots, and a million charity concerts. The guy named an album after Tom Joad. When the post-Covid resale market for live performances went absolutely insane, he decided to allow “dynamic pricing” on his tickets, knowing he couldn’t beat market forces, but could at least divert those surging prices in a profit-sharing scheme with his hardworking crew, instead of letting some jerk with a mega-computer scalp ‘em. (He still got creamed for this, as if his own popularity was his fault.) Trump would have put the tickets on a “memecoin.” (Okay I guess I don’t really know what a memecoin is.)
Anyway, we can probably Make America Great Again, or at least Make America A Cooler Place if we did our best to follow Bruce’s lead. Or at least listened to his music.